Here’s What We Know About US Troops In Yemen

Pentagon spokesperson Major Gen. Patrick Ryder claimed Jan. 17 that there are no U.S. troops in Yemen

FACT CHECK: Does The President Have The Authority To Strike The Houthis?

Multiple members of Congress claimed that President Joe Biden did not have the authority to strike the Houthis without congressional approval. The President must come to Congress for permission before going to war. Biden can not solely decide to bomb Yemen. And what is the condition of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin? Is he still […]

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Congress, Your Duty To Americans Must Trump Your Infatuation With Foreign Wars

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Bipartisan Trio Joins Forces In An Attempt To Claw Back War Powers From President

Clamp down on presidential war powers

House votes to repeal 2002 Iraq War authorization in effort to reclaim congressional war powers



The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of revoking the 2002 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) on Thursday, in a move aimed at returning war powers to Congress that were ceded to the president following 9/11.

What are the details?

The effort, led by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), passed 268-161, with 49 Republicans joining all but one Democrat in voting for the repeal. Proponents argue that the authorization granted under President George W. Bush — for the purpose of military engagement in Iraq — has been abused by occupants of the Oval Office since its passage 19 years ago and utilized to extend far beyond its original purpose.

"Three presidents, both Republicans and Democrats, have used this permission to drag out conflicts that will get us into new ones," Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said on the House floor prior to voting in favor of the legislation, The Washington Post reported.

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), another proponent, argued, "Repeal is crucial because the executive branch has a history of stretching" [the authorization's legal authority], the Chicago Sun-Times reported. "It has already been used as justification for military actions against entities that had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist dictatorship simply because such entities were operating in Iraq."

The New York Post reported that Lee told her colleagues, "Once we pass a repeal of the 2002 AUMF, we must keep up our fight to repeal the 2001 AUMF so that no future president has the unilateral power to plunge us into endless wars."

"We can't afford to leave this in place indefinitely," she added. "For two decades, it has been in place. This is our opportunity to restore our constitutional role."

The New York Post reported that opponents of the measure argued that repealing the 2002 AUMF "could hinder US counterterrorism efforts, noting it was used as part of the legal rationale that allowed President Donald Trump's administration to move forward with the January 2020 drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani."

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said on the floor, "This feels like yet another political effort to undo one of President Trump's boldest counterterrorism successes: using the 2002 AUMF to remove Soleimani from the battlefield. Soleimani was Iran's mastermind of terror for decades."

President Joe Biden voted in favor of the AUMF as a Senator in 2002, but has since expressed his regret for doing so. The White House supports the repeal effort passed by the House.

The Senate called out an undeclared US war, but for the wrong reasons

The Senate passed a resolution on Wednesday that challenges the constitutionality of U.S. involvement in the ongoing conflict in Yemen, but not really because of the Constitution.

Fox News reports:

The Senate on Wednesday advanced a resolution that would end U.S. military support for the Saudi-led conflict in Yemen that human rights advocates say is wreaking havoc on the country and subjecting civilians to indiscriminate bombing.

The procedural vote was 63-37, a rebuke to Saudi Arabia and President Trump's administration, which has issued a veto threat. Late Wednesday, the Senate agreed to postpone any further action on the resolution until next week.

The measure didn’t come out of thin air. Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have been working on this behind the scenes for months on the grounds that Congress should be doing its constitutionally mandated job of overseeing military action.

"Over the past century, Congress's power to declare war has been willfully eroded," Lee said upon introducing the resolution back in February. "Successive presidents have claimed that power — and the politicians in Congress have been only too happy to give it away, in order to avoid tough votes. This resolution is a first step toward Congress re-asserting its power over foreign policy decision-making.

When it came up in the chamber earlier this year, it failed.

So the question is, did this pass because a large group of senators suddenly had a change of heart about the constitutionality of America’s involvement in Yemen at some point over the past eight months? Hardly. This passed because of the murder of an Islamist-sympathizing writer in Turkey.

The resolution finally moved forward not because of a raised constitutional or practical consciousness on American foreign policy, but because of the public backlash over Jamal Khashoggi’s death at the hands of Saudi operatives — an event that, as Jordan Schachtel explains, isn’t enough to destroy our working relationship with the Saudis over.

Lindsey Graham’s explanation best encapsulates where most of the measure’s newfound support ultimately came from. “I changed my mind because I’m pissed,” Graham said on Wednesday. “The way the administration had handled the Saudi Arabia event is just not acceptable.”

We need to take a hard look at how, why, where, and for whom we send our military into harm’s way. The fact that we continue to lose our nation’s elite fighters in places like Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa on a regular basis speaks to that, and having that conversation on the Senate floor would be a good start.

However, those who welcome the Senate’s resolution on constitutional grounds or who would rather see a more restrained approach to the use of military power in American foreign policy would do well keep in mind that this resolution didn’t pass for the reasons it was introduced.

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